39

The same day

They approached the last of the buildings with the greatest of caution. They studied the ground carefully to see if any digging had been done recently. They stared at the slippery plastic drums lined up along the wall, as if they might contain a bomb.

This door also had a padlock that Assad broke open with the iron bar-a skill that would soon have to be added to his job description.

They noticed a sweet smell in the hall’s entrance. Like a mixture of the cologne from Lasse Jensen’s bedroom and the smell of meat that had been left out too long. Or maybe more like the scent of the animal cages at the zoo on a warm, blossoming spring day.

Lying on the floor were scores of receptacles made from in shiny stainless steel in different lengths. Most of them did not yet have gauges affixed to them, but a few of them did. Endless shelves along one wall indicated that production had been planned on a large scale. But that had never happened.

Carl gestured for Assad to follow him over to the next door, holding his index finger to his lips. Assad nodded and gripped the iron bar so hard that his knuckles turned white. He crouched down a bit, as if to make himself a smaller target. He seemed to do so reflexively.

Carl opened the next door.

There was light in the room. Lamps in reinforced glass fixtures lit up a hallway. On one side, doors opened on to a series of windowless offices; on the other side a door led to yet another corridor. Carl gestured for Assad to search the offices while he started down the long, narrow hallway.

It was unspeakably filthy, as if over time shit or some kind of muck had been smeared on the walls and floor. Very unlike the spirit in which the factory’s founder, Henrik Jensen, had wanted to create these surroundings. Carl had a very hard time picturing white-clad engineers in this setting.

At the end of the corridor was a door, which Carl cautiously opened as he clutched the switchblade in his jacket pocket.

He turned on the light and saw what had to be a storage room containing a couple of carts and stacks of plasterboard as well as numerous cylinders of hydrogen and oxygen. He instinctively sniffed at the air. It smelled of cordite. As if a gun had been fired in the room quite recently.

“Nothing in any of the offices,” he heard Assad say quietly behind him.

Carl nodded. There didn’t seem to be anything here either. Except for the same impression of filth as he’d had in the corridor.

Assad came inside and looked around.

“He is not here then, Carl.”

“It’s not him we’re looking for right now.”

Assad frowned. “Then who is it?”

“Shhh,” said Carl. “Do you hear that?”

“What?”

“Listen. It’s a very faint whistling sound.”

“Whistling?”

Carl raised his hand to make Assad stop talking and then closed his eyes. It could be a ventilator in the distance. It could be water running through the pipes.

“It is some air saying like that, Carl. Like something that is punctured.”

“Yes, but where is it coming from?” Carl slowly turned around. It was impossible to pinpoint. The room was no more than ten feet wide and fifteen to twenty feet long, but still the sound seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

He took a mental snapshot of the room. To his left were four pieces of plasterboard, standing up next to each other in layers that were perhaps five boards deep. Against the far wall was a single piece of plasterboard that leaned crookedly. The wall to his right was bare.

He looked up at the ceiling and saw four panels with tiny holes and in between them bundles of wires and copper pipes leading from the corridor and over behind the piles of plasterboard.

Assad saw it too. “There must be something behind the boards then, Carl.”

He nodded. Maybe an outside wall, maybe something else.

With every piece of plasterboard they grabbed and carried over to the opposite wall, the sound seemed to come closer.

Finally they were standing before a wall with a big black box up near the ceiling upon which was mounted a number of switches, gauges, and buttons. To the side of this control panel an arched door had been set into the wall in two sections that were covered with metal plates. To the other side were two big portholes with armored, completely milk-white panes. Wires were taped to the glass between a couple of pins that Carl guessed might be detonators. A surveillance camera on a tripod had been set up under each porthole. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the cameras had been used for and what the detonators were meant to do.

On the floor under the cameras were several little black pellets. He picked some up and saw that they were buckshot. He felt the glass panes and took a step back. There was no question that shots had been fired at them. So maybe there was something going on here that the people on the farm were unable to control.

He pressed his ear against the wall. The whining sound was coming from somewhere inside. Not from the door, not from the windows. Just from inside. It had to be an extremely high-pitched sound for it to penetrate such a solid enclosure.

“It reads more than four bars, Carl.”

He looked at the pressure gauge that Assad was tapping on. He was right. And four bars was the same as five atmospheres. So the pressure inside the room had already dropped by one atmosphere.

“Assad, I think Merete Lynggaard is inside there.”

His partner stood very still, studying the arched metal door. “You think so?”

He nodded.

“The pressure is going in a downward direction, Carl.”

He was right. The needle’s movement was actually visible.

Carl looked up at all the cables overhead. The thin wires between the detonators dangled to the floor with stripped ends. The plan must have been to fasten a battery or some other explosive device to the wires. Was that what they were going to do on May 15, when the pressure was supposed to drop to one atmosphere, as had been written on the back of the photo of Merete Lynggaard?

He looked around to try to make sense of it all. The copper pipes led directly into the room. There were maybe ten in all, so how could anyone tell which ones released the pressure and which ones increased it? If they cut through one of the pipes, there was a huge risk they would make matters worse for the person inside the pressure chamber. The same was true if they did anything to the electrical wires.

He stepped over to the airlock door and examined the relay boxes next to it. Here there was no question-everything was printed in black and white on the six buttons: Top door open. Top door closed. Outer airlock door open. Outer airlock door closed. Inner airlock door open. Inner airlock door closed.

And both airlock doors were in the closed position. That was how they would stay.

“What do you think that thing’s for?” asked Assad. He was perilously close to turning a little potentiometer from OFF to ON.

Carl wished that Hardy was here to see this. If there was one thing that Hardy could deal with better than anyone else, it was anything to do with buttons or dials.

“That switch was then put in after all the others,” said Assad. “Otherwise why are the others made of that brown stuff?” He pointed at a square box made of Bakelite. “And why should that one then be the only one made of plastic, out of all of them?”

It was true. The different types of switches had obviously been fabricated decades apart.

Assad nodded. “I think that dial might either stop the process, or else it does not mean anything.” What an imprecise but beautiful way of putting it.

Carl took a deep breath. It was almost ten minutes since he’d spoken to the people out at Holmen, and it would still take them a while to arrive. If Merete Lynggaard was inside there, they were going to have to do something drastic.

“Turn it,” he told Assad with a sense of foreboding.

As soon as he did, they could hear the whistling sound slicing through the room at full force. Carl’s heart leaped to his throat. For a moment he was convinced that they’d released even more pressure.

Then he looked up and identified the four framed rectangles on the ceiling as loudspeakers. That was how they were able to hear the whistling sounds from inside the room, which had become piercingly enervating.

“What is happening now?” shouted Assad, holding his hands over his ears, making it hard for Carl to answer him.

“I think you’ve turned on the intercom,” he shouted back, turning to look up at the rectangles on the ceiling. “Are you inside there, Merete?” he yelled three or four times and then listened intently.

Now he could clearly hear that the sound was air passing through a narrow passage. Like the noise a person makes with his teeth, just as he begins to whistle. And the sound was constant.

He cast a worried glance at the pressure gauge. Now it was almost down to four point five atmospheres. It was dropping fast.

He shouted again, this time at the top of his lungs, and Assad took his hands away from his ears and shouted too. Their combined yelling could wake the dead, thought Carl, sincerely hoping that things hadn’t gone that far.

Then he heard a loud thud from the black box up near the ceiling, and for a moment the room was totally silent.

That box up there controls the pressure equalization, he thought, considering whether to run into the other room and get something to stand on so he could open the box.

It was at that instant they heard groans coming from the loudspeakers. Like the sounds uttered by a cornered animal or a human being in deep crisis or grief. A long, monotonic moan of lament.

“Merete, is that you?” Carl shouted.

They stood still and waited. Then they heard a sound they interpreted as a yes.

Carl felt a burning in his throat. Merete Lynggaard was inside there. Imprisoned for over five years in this bleak and disgusting setting. And now she was possibly about to die, and Carl had no idea what to do.

“What can we do, Merete?” he yelled. At the same instant he heard an enormous bang from the plasterboard on the far wall. He knew at once that someone had fired a shotgun through the plasterboard from behind, scattering buckshot all over the room. He felt a throbbing several places in his body as warm blood began trickling out. He stood paralyzed for a tenth of a second that felt like an eternity. Then he threw himself backward against Assad, who was standing there with one arm bleeding and an expression that matched the situation.

As they lay on the floor, the plasterboard tipped forward to reveal the person who had fired the shot. It wasn’t hard to recognize him. Aside from the lines on his face, which his hard life and tormented soul had produced over the years, Lasse Jensen looked exactly like the boy in the photos they’d seen.

He stepped out of his hiding place, holding the smoking shotgun, inspecting the wounds his shot had made with the same cool indifference as if it had been a flooded basement.

“How did you find me?” he asked, as he cracked the barrel and inserted more shells. He came over to them. There was no question that he would pull the trigger if he felt like it.

“You can still stop this, Lasse,” Carl said, propping himself up so that Assad could get out from under his body. “If you stop now, you might get off with a few years in prison. Otherwise it’s going to be a life sentence for murder.”

The man smiled. It wasn’t hard to see why women fell for him. He was a devil in disguise. “Then there’s a lot you don’t know,” he said, aiming the gun straight at Assad’s temple.

Yeah, that’s what you think, thought Carl as he felt Assad’s hand feel its way inside his jacket pocket. “I’ve called for backup. My colleagues will be here any minute. Give me that shotgun, Lasse, and everything will be OK.”

Lasse shook his head. He didn’t believe it. “I’ll kill your partner if you don’t give me an answer. How the hell did you find me?”

Considering how much pressure he must be under, Lasse sounded far too controlled. He was obviously raving mad.

“It was Uffe,” Carl told him.

“Uffe?” Now the man’s expression changed. That piece of information just didn’t fit into the world he was determined to control. “Bullshit! Uffe Lynggaard doesn’t know a thing,” Lasse said. “He can’t even talk. I’ve been following the news the past couple of days. He didn’t say a word. You’re lying.”

Carl could feel that Assad had grabbed the switchblade.

To hell with regulations and laws about concealed weapons. He just hoped Assad would have time to use it.

A sound came from the loudspeakers overhead as if the woman in the room wanted to say something.

“Uffe Lynggaard recognized you in a photograph,” Carl said. “A photo of you and Dennis Knudsen standing next to each other as boys. Do you remember that picture, Atomos?”

The name stung him like a slap in the face. It was obvious that years of suffering were now surfacing inside Lasse Jensen.

He grimaced and nodded. “So you know about that too! I assume you know everything. Then you also realize that you’re going to have to accompany Merete.”

“You won’t have time. Help is on the way,” Carl said, leaning forward a bit so that Assad could pull out the knife and lunge at the man in one movement. The question was whether the psychopath would be able to press the trigger in time. If Lasse fired both barrels simultaneously at such close range, he and Assad were done for.

Lasse smiled again. He had already regained his composure. It was the trademark of a psychopath: nothing could touch him.

“Oh, I’ll have time. You can be sure of that.”

The jerk in Carl’s jacket pocket and the subsequent click of the switchblade coincided with the sound that flesh makes when you stick a knife into it. Sinews being severed, healthy muscles clipped. Carl saw the blood on Lasse’s leg just as Assad knocked the shotgun upward with his bloodied left arm. The boom from the shotgun next to Carl’s ears when Lasse fired out of sheer reflex blocked out all other sounds. He saw Lasse silently topple over backward, and then Assad threw himself at the man, his knife raised to strike.

“No!” yelled Carl, though he could barely hear the sound of his own voice. He tried to get up but now felt the full extent of the shot he’d taken. He looked down underneath himself and saw blood pouring out onto the floor. Then he grabbed his thigh and pressed hard as he stood up.

Assad sat down, bleeding, on Lasse’s chest, with the knife pressed to the man’s throat. Carl couldn’t hear, but he could see Assad shouting at the man beneath him, and he saw Lasse spitting in Assad’s face with every sentence he spoke.

Slowly Carl regained his hearing in one ear. The relay overhead had again begun releasing air from the chamber. This time the whistling sound was a notch higher than before. Or was it his hearing that was playing tricks on him?

“How do we stop this shit? How do we shut off the ventilators? Tell me!” shouted Assad for the umpteenth time, taking another wad of spit in the face. Only now did Carl notice that each time Lasse spat, the knife was pressed harder against his throat.

“I have cut throats of better men than you!” Assad yelled and made a shallow slice into the skin, deep enough for the blood to trickle down Lasse’s neck.

“Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you,” Lasse snarled. Carl looked down at Lasse’s leg, where Assad had stabbed him. It wasn’t bleeding very heavily, not like when the big femoral artery in the thigh is severed. But it was still serious enough.

He looked up at the manometer; the pressure was dropping slowly but steadily. Where the hell was the police backup? Hadn’t the officer at Holmen called his colleagues, as he’d requested? Carl leaned against the wall and took out his cell phone. He punched in the number of the duty officer and was told help would arrive in a matter of minutes. His colleagues and the medics were going to have their hands full.

He didn’t feel the blow to his arm; he merely noticed his cell phone on the floor and how his arm fell to his side. He jerked his body around and saw the skinny creature standing behind them take aim again and slam the iron bar against Assad’s temple. He fell over without a word.

Then Lasse’s brother took a step forward and stomped on Carl’s cell phone until it was smashed to bits.

“Oh God, is it serious, my boy?” came a voice from behind them. The woman rolled toward them in her wheelchair, all life’s woes etched into her face. She paid no attention to the unconscious man lying on the floor. She saw only the blood sieving through her son’s trouser leg.

Lasse got up with difficulty, giving Carl a furious look. “It’s nothing, Mum,” he said. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, pulled off his belt, and wrapped both of them tightly around his thigh, assisted by his brother.

She wheeled past them and stared up at the manometer. “How’s it going, you miserable bitch?” she shouted at the windowpane.

Carl looked down at Assad, who was breathing weakly on the floor. Maybe he was going to survive. Carl scanned the floor in hopes of locating the switchblade. It could be underneath Assad, or maybe it would come into view if the gaunt one moved aside.

It was as if Hans was reading Carl’s mind. He turned toward Carl with a child’s expression on his face, as if Carl was going to steal something from him, or even start hitting him. The look he gave Carl was one that stemmed from the loneliness of childhood. From the taunts of other children who didn’t understand how vulnerable a simple-minded individual could be. He raised the iron bar and aimed for Carl’s throat.

“Should I kill him, Lasse? Should I? I can do it.”

“You’re not doing anything,” said the woman, rolling her wheelchair closer.

“Sit down, you bastard cop,” commanded Lasse as he straightened up to his full height. “Go get the battery, Hans. We’re going to blow this building sky-high. It’s the only thing we can do now. Hurry up. In ten minutes we’re out of here.”

He reloaded the shotgun, keeping his eyes fixed on Carl, who slid down the wall until he was sitting with his back against the airlock door.

Then Lasse ripped the duct tape off the windowpanes and grabbed the explosive charges. With one swift movement he wrapped the deadly mix of wires and detonators around Carl’s neck like a scarf.

“You won’t feel anything, so don’t be scared. But for her in there things will be different. That’s the way it has to be,” Lasse said coldly, dragging the gas cylinders over toward the wall of the pressure chamber behind Carl.

Then his brother came back with the battery and a coil of wire.

“No, we’re going to do it in a different way, Hans. We’ll take the battery outside with us. You just have to connect it like this,” said Lasse, showing him how the explosives around Carl’s neck should be connected to the detonation cords and then to the battery. “Cut off a really long piece. It has to reach all the way out to the yard.” He laughed and looked straight at Carl. “We’ll connect the current outside, and the explosion will take this fucker’s head off and blow up the gas cylinders.”

“But what about before that? What about him?” asked his brother, pointing at Carl. “He could just tear off the wires.”

“Him?!” Lasse smiled and pulled the battery farther away from Carl. “You’re entirely right. In a minute I’m going to let you beat him senseless.”

Then his voice changed, and he turned again to look at Carl, a grave expression on his face. “How the hell did you find me? You said it was because of Dennis Knudsen and Uffe. But I don’t understand. How did you link them to me?”

“You made thousands of mistakes, you clown. That’s how!”

Lasse backed up a bit with what could only be interpreted as insanity rooted deep in his eyes. He was sure to shoot Carl a moment from now. Just take careful aim and pull the trigger. Then good-bye, Carl. No matter what, Lasse wasn’t going to let this cop stop him from blowing up the place. As if Carl didn’t know.

With peace in his soul, Carl looked up at Lasse’s brother. He was fumbling. Couldn’t get the wires to lie properly. They kept curling together as he unrolled them.

At that instant Carl felt Assad’s wounded arm trembling against his leg. Maybe he wasn’t hurt that badly. Small consolation in this situation, because in a moment they’d both lie dead.

Carl closed his eyes and tried to recall a couple of significant moments in his life. After a few seconds of nothingness, he opened them again. Even that solace was denied him.

Had his life really had so few high points to offer?

“You need to leave the room now, Mother,” he heard Lasse say. “Go out to the yard, far away from the outer walls. We’ll join you in a minute. Then we’ll all disappear.”

She nodded, took one last look at the porthole, and spat on the glass.

As she passed her sons, she looked down with disdain at Carl and the man lying next to him. She would have kicked them if she could. They had stolen her life, just as others had stolen it before them. She was in a permanent state of bitterness and hatred. No other emotion would be allowed to penetrate the protective glass bubble in which she lived.

There’s no room for you to get past, you witch, thought Carl, noticing how awkwardly Assad’s leg was stretched out to the side.

When her wheelchair drove into Assad’s leg, he uttered a roar. In one movement he leaped to his feet and was standing between the woman and the door. The two men standing next to the windows whirled around. Lasse raised the shotgun as Assad, blood pouring from his temple, crouched down behind the wheelchair, grabbed the woman’s bony knees, and stormed toward the men, using the chair as a battering ram. The cacophony of sounds was infernal. Assad roaring, the woman screaming, the whistling from the pressure chamber, and the warning shouts of the two men that was cut off by the chaos caused by the wheelchair as it knocked them down.

The woman lay with her legs in the air as Assad jumped on top of her and threw himself at the shotgun, which Lasse was trying to aim at him. The brother started wailing when Assad got hold of the barrel with one hand and began pounding Lasse’s larynx with the other. In a few seconds it was all over.

Assad moved away, holding on to the shotgun. He shoved the wheelchair aside, forced a coughing Lasse to his feet, and stood there for a moment, staring at him.

“Tell us how to stop this shit then!” he shouted as Carl stood up as well.

Carl spied the switchblade over by the wall. He unwrapped the wires and detonators from around his neck and went over to get the knife as Hans tried to pick up his mother.

“Tell us. Now!” Carl stuck the knife against Lasse’s cheek.

They both saw it in Lasse’s eyes. He didn’t believe them. In his mind, only one thing was important: Merete Lynggaard had to die inside the room behind them. Alone, slowly and painfully. That was Lasse’s goal. He would take whatever punishment they gave him afterward. At that point, what did it matter?

“We will blow up him and his family, Carl,” said Assad, his eyes narrowed. “Merete Lynggaard is finished soon anyway. We cannot do anything for her more then.” He pointed up at the manometer that now showed well under four atmospheres. “We do the same to them that they wanted to do to us. And we do Merete a favor.”

Carl looked intently at his partner. Inside those warm, brown eyes he saw a glint of genuine hatred that wouldn’t need much coaxing.

Carl shook his head. “We can’t do that, Assad.”

“Yes, Carl, we can,” answered Assad. He reached out and slowly pulled the wires and detonators out of Carl’s hand. Then he wrapped them around Lasse’s neck.

As Lasse glanced over at his imploring mother and his brother, who was shaking as he stood behind her wheelchair, Assad gave Carl a look that was unmistakable. They had to press Lasse to the point where he would start to take them seriously. Lasse might not fight to save his own skin, but he would fight to save his mother’s and brother’s. Assad had seen it in his eyes, and he was right.

Then Carl raised Lasse’s arms and attached the stripped ends of the wires to the detonation cords, as Lasse had prescribed.

“Go sit in the corner,” Carl ordered the woman and her younger son. “Hans, take your mother over there and set her on your lap.”

He looked at Carl with frightened eyes; then he picked up his mother in his arms as if she were a piece of fluff and sat down on the floor with his back against the far wall.

“We’re going to blow up all three of you along with Merete Lynggaard, if you don’t tell us how to shut off your infernal machine,” said Carl as he twisted a detonation cord on to one of the battery terminals.

Lasse turned his gaze away from his mother and looked at Carl. Hatred burned in his eyes. “I don’t know how to stop it,” he said calmly. “I could find out by reading the manuals, but there’s no time for that.”

“That’s a lie! You’re just stalling for time!” shouted Carl. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that Assad was considering striking Lasse.

“Believe whatever you like,” said Lasse and turned his head to give Assad a smile.

Carl nodded. The man wasn’t lying. He was ice cold, but he wasn’t lying. Years of experience told Carl that. Lasse didn’t know how to stop the system without reading the manual. Very bad luck.

He turned to Assad. “Are you OK?” he asked, placing his hand on the barrel of the shotgun only seconds before Assad would have smashed the butt end into Lasse’s face.

Assad nodded angrily. The buckshot in his arm hadn’t done any significant damage, nor had the blow to his head. He was made of solid stuff.

Carl carefully took the shotgun out of his hands. “I can’t go that far. I’m taking the gun, Assad, and I want you to run over and get the manual. You saw where it was. The handwritten manual in the inside room. It’s in the pile at the very end. On top, I think. Go get it, Assad. And hurry!”

Lasse smiled as soon as Assad left and Carl stuck the barrel of the shotgun under his chin. Like a gladiator, Lasse was weighing his opponents’ strengths to choose the one who matched him best. It was clear he figured Carl was a better choice than Assad. And it was equally clear to Carl that he was wrong.

Lasse began backing toward the door. “You don’t dare shoot me. The other guy would have done it. I’m going now, and you can’t stop me.”

“Is that what you think?” Carl stepped forward and grabbed him hard by the throat. The next time the man made a move, he was going to slam the gun in his face.

Then they heard the police sirens in the distance.

“Run!” screamed Lasse’s brother as he abruptly stood up, clutching his mother, and kicked the wheelchair at Carl.

Lasse was gone in a second. Carl wanted to run after him, but he couldn’t. He was apparently in worse shape than Lasse; his wounded leg simply refused to obey.

He aimed the gun at the woman and her son as he let the wheelchair roll past and crash into the wall.

“Look!” yelled Hans, pointing at the long cord that Lasse was trailing after him.

They all watched as the cord slid across the floor. Lasse was obviously trying to tear the explosives from his neck as he ran down the corridor. They saw the slack in the cord being taken up as he made his way out of the building, until at last the wires wouldn’t reach any farther and the battery toppled over and was dragged toward the door. When it reached the corner and ran into the doorframe, the loose wire slipped underneath the battery and touched the other terminal.

They felt the explosion only as a faint tremor, along with a muffled thud in the distance.


Merete lay on her back in the dark and listened to the whistling as she tried to arrange the position of her arms so that she could press hard on both wrists at the same time.

It wasn’t long before her skin began to itch, but nothing else happened. For a moment she felt as if the greatest possible miracle was going to shine upon her, and she screamed at the nozzles in the ceiling that they weren’t going to get her.

But she knew the miracle wasn’t going to happen when the first filling began loosening in her mouth. During the next few minutes she considered letting go of her wrists as the headache and joint pains and the pressure on all her internal organs worsened and began to spread. By the time she decided to let go of her wrists, she couldn’t even feel her hands.

I need to turn over, she thought, and ordered her body to turn on to its side, but her muscles no longer had any strength. She noticed everything getting hazy at the same time as nausea made her retch, almost suffocating her.

She lay on the floor, immobile, and felt the convulsions increase. First in her gluteal muscles, then her abdomen, and up into her chest.

It’s going too slow! a voice inside of her cried, as she again tried to release her grip on the arteries in her wrists.

After a few more minutes she slipped into a foggy lethargy. It was impossible to hold on to thoughts of Uffe. She saw flashes of color and glints of light and spinning shapes; that was all.

When the first filling burst out of her tooth, she began a prolonged and monotonous moaning. All the energy she had left went into this tortured sound. But she didn’t hear herself; the whistling from the nozzles overhead was much too loud.

All of a sudden the seeping out of air stopped, and the sound disappeared. For a moment she imagined that she might be saved. She heard voices outside. They were calling for her, and she stopped her wailing. Then a voice asked if she was Merete. Everything inside her called out: “Yes, I’m here.” Maybe she said the words out loud. After that she heard them talking about Uffe as if he were a normal boy. She said his name, but it sounded wrong. Then she heard a loud bang, and Lasse’s voice was back, slicing through all her hope. She breathed slowly, noticing the clumsy grip of her fingers letting go of her wrists. She didn’t know if she was still bleeding. She felt neither pain nor relief. Then the whistling in her cage returned.

When the earth shook beneath her, everything turned cold and hot at the same time. For a moment she remembered God and whispered His name to herself. Next she felt a flash inside her head.

A flash of light followed by an enormous roaring and more light streaming in.

And then she let go of herself.

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